Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  But I’m not alone.

  Voices carry through the cabin. The shuffling of boots across the floor.

  The others have returned.

  I stay still, listening to their lumbering movements, the door shutting behind them. The cabin is dark, the sun long set, and they don’t know I’m here, hidden in the top bunk. They don’t know I’m back.

  “Told you the fire wouldn’t go out,” one of them says. I recognize the voice—the voices of the boys who I shared a cabin with before my mind went blank. Before I went missing. It sounds like Jasper, his words more pitched than the others.

  I hear someone add more wood to the stove, the kicking off of boots, the opening and closing of dresser drawers. The bunk below me creaks as Lin flops onto his mattress and starts tapping a foot against the wood frame.

  Jasper, whose bunk is directly across from mine, says, “I don’t know why I need to learn this shit. When will I need to use a compass? After I leave here, I’m never going into the woods again.”

  “You’ll probably get a job as one of the counselors,” Lin suggests below me, and laughs in a quick burst.

  “Hell no,” Jasper answers.

  A long pause settles between them, and the wind grows louder outside, making the fire in the stove pop and crack. Drops of rain begin to drum against the roof.

  I think they’ve fallen asleep, but then Jasper says, “It’s been two weeks.”

  Below him, in the bottom bunk, Rhett snaps, “Shut up, man.”

  “I just wonder where he is,” Jasper adds quickly.

  “He’ll turn up,” Rhett answers, his voice biting. Sharp as tacks. Maybe I should say something, tell them I’m here—but I stay quiet, a knot twisted in my stomach.

  “Can you blame him for not wanting to come back?” Lin asks below me. The room falls quiet. “I’d hide too.”

  Jasper makes a sound. “No shit.”

  Someone grumbles, someone else coughs, but no one speaks. And soon the cabin is filled with the sounds of sleep. Of mutters and snores, feet kicking at their footboards, blankets tugged up beneath chins to keep out the cold.

  Wind squeals through cracks between the thick log walls. A never-ending scream. Long and hollow. A desperate sound.

  The rain turns to sleet and then snow, collecting on the windowsills. The dark outside becomes darker.

  But I lie perfectly still, listening to their breathing. They don’t know I’m back. That I’ve returned from the woods. I’d hide too, Lin said.

  What happened that night, when the storm rattled the walls of the cabin, when my memory blots out?

  I push back the blanket and move silently down the narrow ladder, then across the room. None of them stir. I could wake them, tell them I’m back, ask them what happened that night—ask them to fill in the parts I can’t remember. But the gnawing in my throat won’t let me. The sliver of pain thrumming inside my chest tells me I shouldn’t trust them.

  Something happened that my mind won’t let me remember.

  Something that is more darkness than light.

  I can’t stay here, with them. There are only bad memories in this place.

  I yank on my boots and open the door just wide enough to slip through. I glance back and see someone stirring, Rhett I think, his head lifted. But I pull the door shut before he can focus through the dark.

  Before he can see me sneaking out.

  NORA

  Night comes swiftly in the mountains.

  The sinking sun devoured by the snowy peaks. Eaten whole.

  I carry in freshly cut logs from the woodshed and drop them beside the woodstove—enough to keep Suzy and me warm through the night. If they’ll actually light.

  “You found all these things in the woods?” Suzy asks, standing at the darkened window, running a finger over the items that fascinate her placed along the windowsill: silver candlesticks and a small, palm-sized figurine in the shape of a boy and girl dancing, the freckle-faced girl’s head inclined like she’s facing an imaginary sky. These found things I know by heart. The stories they tell.

  Suzy spent most of the day holding her cell phone in the air, near windows, trying to find a signal—even after I told her she’d never get reception out here. Then she’d walk into the kitchen and pick up the landline, listening for a dial tone. But there was always nothing. Just the flat silence. Finally, she turned off her cell phone again to save the battery.

  Now, with evening upon us, she seems defeated, her voice low and disheartened.

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “During a full moon.”

  She watches the snow eddy against the window. “People at school talk about you,” she says absently, like I’m not really listening. “They say you talk to the trees. And to the dead.” She says it in a way that makes me think she wants to believe it, so she can return to school when this is all over and say: I stayed in the house of Nora Walker and it’s all true.

  And maybe I should feel hurt, wounded by her statement, but I know what people say about me, about my family, and their words fall like dull raindrops on my skin, never soaking in. I know what I am—and what I’m not. And I don’t blame them for their curiosity. Sometimes I think it might only be envy they feel—a desire to be more than what they are. To escape the blandness of their ordinary lives.

  I walk into the kitchen and light two candles with a match—one for Suzy and one for me. “I’ve never talked to the dead,” I admit. The truth. Although Walkers have often been able to see shadows, glimpses of ghosts wandering through the old graveyard on the far side of lake. We see flickers of the in-between, phantoms moving from one corner of the house to the other. Our eyes see what others can’t. But I don’t tell Suzy this. Proof that I might really be what they say I am.

  Suzy’s eyelids flutter and she taps her fingers against her opposite forearm, narrowing her gaze like she doesn’t believe me, like she’s certain I must be hiding something—a dozen black cats in the attic, a broomstick tucked behind winter coats in the hall closet, jars filled with my victims’ hearts beneath the floorboards. But nothing so gruesome exists within this house. Only herbs and chimney soot and stories that rest inside the walls. “I’ll make you a bed on the couch,” I tell her.

  The blankets and pillow from when Oliver slept here last night are still rumpled at the end.

  But Suzy glances to the couch, with its sagging cushions and frayed armrests and stuffing bursting out, and she frowns. She drops her arms, and her mouth makes a little pout. “Is there a bed where I can sleep?”

  “Sorry.”

  Her eyes cut away and she surveys the living room. She had probably hoped I lived in one of the larger homes on the lake—the log villas with five bedrooms, game rooms in the basement, and spa bathrooms where she could take a bubble bath to soothe the constant chill. “Could I maybe…?” Her words trail away. “Could I sleep with you, in your room?”

  Another twinge of sympathy shudders through me.

  I don’t want to say yes, I don’t want to share my bed with a girl who surely talks about me at school, who will only stare at all the strange things in my room and then spread more stories about me back at Fir Haven High. But a part of me also wants to feel normal—an ordinary girl who can have friends over and stay up late and not worry about what Suzy will say about me back at school.

  The word slips out before I can catch it. “Fine.”

  I lock both doors and we climb the stairs to the loft, Fin close behind.

  Suzy strides over to the wall of windows, and I divide the pillows on my bed: one for Suzy, one for me. The snow is heavier now, falling in thick waves against the glass. I wonder if the moth is out there, stalking me, waiting in the trees. The week before my grandmother passed away, a bone moth had been pinging against the windows of the house all morning, tap tap tapping; flit, flit, flitting. I thought it was going to break the glass, its delicate wings beating so frantically, its tiny head thumping against the windows. It was the first time I’d ever seen one—the kind of moth my g
randmother warned about—and I watched my mom pace through the house, ringing her hands together, braiding and unbraiding her hair methodically, as if the solution to the moth were in the folds of her dark hair.

  She knew death was coming—the bone moth was a sign.

  And when we woke to find that Grandma had wandered down to the lake in the middle of the night, taken her last breath on the shore, autumn leaves scattered around her—sad shades of orange and golden-yellows—we knew the moth had been right. Death was coming. Just as we’d feared.

  And now, one follows me.

  “Why do you stay here in the winter?” Suzy asks, touching her fingertips to the window.

  I pinch my eyes closed, shoving away the memory of the moth and my grandmother. “It’s my home.”

  “I know, but you could leave in winter, like everyone else.”

  “I like the winters,” I say. I like the quiet. The cold, unending silence. But it’s more than that. I belong here. Every Walker for generations has lived in these woods. Between these ancient pines. It’s just how it’s always been.

  We don’t know how to live anywhere else.

  “Your house is older than the others,” Suzy notes, still peering out the window where she can just barely see the outline of other homes along the lake.

  “My great-great-grandfather built it,” I tell her. “Long before any other houses lined the shore.” Her gaze is soft, and the light from the candle she holds flickers across her cheekbones and tawny hair. “He was a gold miner,” I continue. “He made his fortune in the Black River.” But like most of the men in my family, he came and went just as swiftly as the hours fell into night. It wasn’t their fault—Walker women were known to be fickle, uncertain when it came to love. And men were only ever a passing fascination. Much like the man who was my father. Whether by bad luck or our choosing, men never stayed long in our lives.

  I walk to the closet and change into black sweatpants and a thick, knobby sweater. But Suzy stays at the window, pressing her palm to the glass. “You said you found that missing boy?” she asks.

  I close the closet door, catching my reflection in the closet mirror briefly—sleepy eyes and hair that needs to be brushed. “Up in the woods,” I say cautiously.

  Locals know of the Wicker Woods. They speak about it in a hush, in tones never above a whisper. As if saying it aloud will draw the darkness out. Never speak of the Wicker Woods behind its back, a notation inside the spellbook warns.

  “He survived out there all this time?” she asks, dropping her hand from the window.

  “He got lucky,” I say. Or maybe it’s opposite of luck. To find yourself lost inside the Wicker Woods is catastrophically unlucky. One of the ill-fated, my grandmother would say if she were here. Doomed. A boy to steer clear of.

  An itch trickles down my vertebrae, cold as ice, lodging itself like concrete in my chest.

  “He could have ended up like that other boy,” Suzy says.

  My gaze snaps to hers, her silhouette outlined against the huge windows, snow swirling against the glass. “What other boy?”

  She lifts one shoulder. “The one who died.” She swivels around to face me. “The same night your boy went missing.”

  He’s not my boy, I want to say. But instead I ask, “A boy died?”

  Her mouth pinches flat and severe. “Yeah, the night of the storm.”

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t know. Just overheard the other boys talking about it. They wanted to call the police, but the phones have been down.”

  I step closer to her. “Who was he?”

  “Not sure.” She weaves a bit of hair through her fingers. Not nervously, just out of habit. “They kept it pretty quiet, no one wanted to talk about it. But I overheard their whispers in the hall, when they thought I couldn’t hear.”

  “Did they say how he died?” I ask. My lungs have tightened in my chest, the breath held still at the back of my throat.

  She shakes her head, her eyebrows drawn close—wincing at the thought of someone meeting their demise way out here, in these woods, in the bitter cold. “I only heard them say that a boy was missing and another was dead.”

  I sink onto the edge of the bed, looking past Suzy to the window. “Someone died,” I say softly, mostly to my myself, and I run my finger over my grandmother’s ring, feeling the oval shape of the gray moonstone. As if I could summon her, hear the soothing tenor of her words whenever she told me one of her stories. But she doesn’t appear.

  Suzy and I are silent for some time, the cold slipping through the walls as the fire downstairs begins to die. The room feels strangely hollow, a ringing starts in my ears, and when I blink, I think I see the walls vibrate before snapping back into place.

  I must be tired. It must be from lack of sleep.

  Suzy finally blows out a breath. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “It’s too awful.” And she shuffles across the room to the other side of the bed, crawling swiftly between the sheets, still in her sweatshirt and jeans. As if she could hide from it—the death of a boy. A thing easily wiped away with a shroud of warm wool blankets.

  Her eyelids sink closed, and her soft, oceany hair fans out over the pillow. She smells of rose water, like an old French fragrance no longer used except by ladies in nursing homes who smoke thin cigarettes and still paint their nails cherry-blossom red.

  And for a moment, I could almost trick myself into believing we’re having a sleepover, two best friends who stayed up late eating buttered popcorn and watching horror movies, curling each other’s hair, and giggling about the boys we’ve kissed at school. A different night entirely. A different life.

  Others look at me and see a witch. A girl who is dangerous and fearless and full of dark thoughts. But they don’t see the parts of me I keep hidden. The loss, the feeling of being alone, now that the only person who ever really understood me, my grandmother, is gone. That I carry around a feeling of being not quite good enough. A hollow brick lodged in my rib cage.

  No one sees that I have just as many wounds as everyone else.

  That I too am a little broken.

  Reluctantly, I slide into bed.

  Suzy’s knees bump mine, an elbow to the head, and when she finally falls asleep, she snores against her pillow, a soft muttering that is almost soothing.

  But I lie awake. My mind crackling.

  A boy is dead. And I feel sick. A boy is dead. And we’re trapped in these mountains. A boy is dead. And I don’t know how to feel. If it were summer and the road were clear, the police would come. They’d ask questions. They’d determine cause. But none of this will happen until the road opens, and I don’t know if I should be afraid or not. How did he die? Accident or something else? Suzy skimmed over it like a footnote, something she would barely recall a year from now. Oh right, that winter a boy died, how did that happen again?

  But I’ve never known anyone who has died, aside from my grandmother. And perhaps if it wasn’t for the moth, or the boy I found in the woods, I’d feel less fidgety. My mind less clacking and clicking like the grasshoppers who twitch in the tall beach grass under autumn moons. Perhaps.

  But instead my thoughts writhe in circles: Does Oliver know what happened to the boy who died? Was he there when it happened? Does he remember?

  An hour passes and snow collides against the windows, a storm tumbles down from the mountains. Fin scratches against the wood floor, his paws twitching—dreaming of chasing rabbits or mice.

  I force my eyelids closed. I beg sleep to fall over me.

  But I stare at the ceiling instead.

  Until, when the night seems darkest and my mind the most restless, there is a thump against the house. Then a tap tap tap on glass.

  Someone’s here. Outside.

  * * *

  “What is it?” Suzy mumbles, eyes still closed. She might only be talking in her sleep—not really awake at all.

  “I heard something downstairs,” I hiss softly, pushing up from the bed.
“At the door.” My eyes skip to the stairs, listening.

  “Mm,” she answers, wriggling herself deeper and burying her head in the pillow.

  The wind claps against the house, and my heart claps inside my chest. I move down the steps, one at a time, careful and quiet. A boy is dead, my mind repeats with each thud of my heartbeat.

  I hear the knock again, distinct and quick, coming from the other side of the front door. It might only be Mr. Perkins or one of the counselors from camp—come to warn me that a murderer is among us. Come to tell me to lock my doors and stay inside. I used to be the one to fear in these woods, but maybe not anymore.

  I walk to the front window, breathing slowly, trying to calm the adrenaline pressing at my temples, and pull back the curtain. Someone stands on the porch, hands in pockets, shoulders bent away from the cold.

  My fingers slide the dead bolt free and pull open the door. Snow coils in around me, wind whipping into the living room, and he lifts his head.

  Oliver.

  “I didn’t know where else to go,” he says, a line puckering between his brows.

  The breath returns to my lungs and I take a step back, letting him move swiftly inside. “What are you doing here?”

  He pushes back the hood of his sweatshirt, and his eyes sweep up to mine. Dark pupils, made even darker in the unlit house. “I need a place to stay.”

  I cross my arms over my midsection, my thoughts still cycling over the words I can’t shake, a tune on repeat: A boy is dead. “Why can’t you stay at the camp?” I ask.

  I watch him, trying to pinpoint all the reasons why I shouldn’t allow this boy I hardly know to stand inside my home, why I should tell him to leave, but I only see the boy I found inside the Wicker Woods: cold and shivering and alone. His bare chest facing the fire when I brought him back. How his hands felt like ice, how his jaw clenched, how his muscles only relaxed when I touched him.

  “I don’t trust anyone there,” he answers.

  “Why not?”

  His eyes hook on mine before slipping away. And after a long, muted pause, he says simply, “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”